Preservation of Life
by FunkyWashingMachine
Summary: Suffering brain damage from the hoktril, alternate-reality Pidge joins the Guns of Gamara. Content warning for death and gore
1. Hoktril

She woke bleeding from the back of her head.

It felt like crying. It had been such a long time. The wound in her head was crying, everything inside her was crying and she didn't know why. Warm down the back of her neck, something twisting inside her head, it twisted so loudly she couldn't scream.

"I said hold her still! This is not a good time for you to fall apart on me!"

Her vision was blurred. There was a light up above. When she looked she could hardly see it.

It hurt terribly to turn her head.

"Sven!"

It felt like fire. It felt like she was riding an ocean with twenty-foot waves.

She wasn't supposed to be here.

"I'm not supposed to be here," she said.

"No, you are not, but you are here anyway," said the voice from behind her. "And since you can hear me now, PLEASE keep still."

"Are you my handler?"

"If it keeps you still while I remove this, yes, I am your handler."

"Why do I feel like crying?"

"Probably because there is a very large needle in your brain."

"That sounds pretty suboptimal."

Everything was pretty suboptimal. She was so fucking dizzy.

"Okay, Sven, you ready?"

There was a bit of motion in front of her, a covering of the light, and what felt like hands on the sides of her head.

And then pain like she had never known.

That she could remember.

There was pressure on the back of her head now, her whole neck was wet.

"That's going to be the worst of it," said that person behind her.

The sound that came out of her was animalistic. The voice spoke again.

"If you are going to be sick, be sick on him and not me."

"Okay, that is not necessary," came another close voice.

"Well I do not need any more contamination over here."

"She going to be all right?"

"I'd say there's about a sixty-four percent chance, if by 'all right' you mean 'alive.'"

She yanked one of the hands off her temple and bit it.

"Hey!" the owner shouted, pulling it back. "Okay, how about 'normal?' Will she be normal?"

"I'm only a genius, I don't do magic."

"It's fine…" the other one said. "Alive is fine."

None of this was fine. She was going to throw up. She felt like she'd been shot in the skull.

"Where's my brother?" she said.

"Sven. Pulse."

The person in front of her took her wrist.

"It's a bit fast."

"Probably stress."

"Is this kind of blood loss normal?"

"Sven, you are not helping. Swallow test."

She was handed a cup. Just barely, she could see the light reflecting from the inside.

"Drink this."

"I'm gonna puke."

"Well, don't do it there," the voice behind her said, as the cup was lifted out of her hand. "Water does not grow on trees."

She threw up on something. She couldn't see it but it felt like a towel.

"Did that help at all?" the voice in front asked her.

"No."

"Well I am afraid we don't have any anesthetic on this base, but perhaps you would like to know that you are doing better than average," said the other one.

"I'm a genius."

That's right. She was.

"Yes, of course, and that is what the Alteans liked about you."

Alteans.

Her handler.

"I'm not supposed to be here."

"Yes, that is correct," the voice behind her agreed. "What else do you remember?"

The word "remember" seemed like such a strange one.

"There was someone who talked nice. But I think I didn't always like him."

"I'll bet you didn't."

She felt her fist tighten somewhere miles from where her body was.

"They took my brother and they put something in his brain and he didn't know my name anymore."

"Okay, hold still. You are still bleeding."

All of her insides were crying. The tears pooled in her hands, miles and miles away.

"He was so excited to meet them…"

She felt a gentle poke in the back.

"You know what? It is time to lie down now."

"WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON?"

She wished she hadn't turned to face that voice.

"Let's be quiet, yes?" said the other one. She felt a pair of arms wrapping around her. "You heard him, you're going to be all right."

He was shaking. He was probably lying.

"So your name is Katie?" he said.

"Are you my handler?"

"No, but that's what he called you."

"What the fuck is going on."

The arms let go of her and the voices moved. She saw two shapes, one that looked human and one that didn't.

"There is a high probability that if we tell you now, you will forget in ninety-four ticks and we will just have to tell you again," said the strange one.

"Then we'll do it," the human said, sounding annoyed. "The Alteans were using you, and we got you out."

"Only thirteen percent of realities where we save you end well for any of us, so you can thank Sven for insisting on it. But if anything goes wrong, it is most likely his fault now."

"Okay, you don't need to be so mean, I would have helped you save someone of YOUR kind."

"And in the realities where the Guns of Gamara do not fall apart because of that decision, I am grateful."

It was definitely not human. It was a little more clear. It had too many arms.

"Using me," she said.

"Yes, they are known to do that," the strange creature said. "Apparently you registered on their charts as a brilliant technical mind, despite being of a primitive species."

Brilliant technical mind. That sounded about right.

"As a matter of fact, you are lucky," the creature continued. "You were given a less invasive hoktril so as to allow for some cognitive processing. A much easier removal procedure. They're not designed to be removed."

They weren't.

But she knew how.

"I want to go home."

"Your home isn't safe anymore."

She knew that already.

"Our faction will take you," said the human. "Even if they didn't send for you."

"They didn't send for me. So what were you doing in the facility, then?"

She saw the shapes of the nervous glance they exchanged. But they didn't speak.

"Something else," the human said, looking away.

"We were neutralizing a threat, is all," the alien said, a bit gruffly. "It just happens that you survived it in this reality."

Survival was a thing that hurt. She knew that by the stabbing in her head.

These two people must have known that, too.

Her vision was watering back and she could see them. In front of her, a human face. The emptiness resounded inside her.

It hurt to move but she couldn't look anymore.

And that's when she saw it. The plates and the needles, sticky with blood. Clotted with something that may or may not have been gray matter. Something that would still be warm if she touched it.

When she vomited again, it had nothing to do with the brain injury.


	2. Proprioception

He had a very kind smile.

 _It's not the best design, is it? Tell me, how would YOU improve it?_

He wasn't here anymore.

Katie rubbed her eyes.

Her vision would come and go, and so would the face of that man.

He'd had SUCH a kind smile.

When she told the Guns of Gamara the things she'd told him, they got scared. When she THOUGHT about those things, she got scared too.

Not that she could remember everything between them. But it was technology. She'd given it to him.

She remembered not trusting him at first. But then everything changed. Under what the Alteans called the "partnership" of the hoktril, the continuum of trust ceased to exist. There was no trust, there was no DIStrust. There were only words being said and a body that listened to them.

She thought of all the things she told him and she cried. The human understood.

"This is not one of your lucky realities," his friend told her.

They weren't the people she'd have picked to be with, but they were nice.

They were missing their families, too.

Her right arm had come back to itself. Her left arm still lived somewhere outside her body. Accepting a drink or a blanket, the touch registered far away from where her hand was. Like it lived in another reality. Maybe it lived in the lucky one. She couldn't fault it for jumping ship.

Her handwriting was terrible now. But the Guns didn't read English anyway.

She never felt hungry. They had to remind her to eat.

They didn't smile like her handler.

But then, she'd never disappointed him.

She'd met a few other Guns on the base.

She had trouble remembering their names.

They didn't hate her, but she knew they didn't want her either.

A drain on their resources. A disappointment.

The brain of the Altean Empire.

"Your mission wasn't to bring her back," someone admonished her rescuers.

They wouldn't have said that if she was still useful.

They had asked her to design a weapon for them, too.

She stared at the prototypes, she thought hard for hours.

She didn't know how.

There was something that wasn't there anymore.

Without the necessary parts, a computer wouldn't run.

It felt like suffocation.

They knew she was suffering, but there was very little gentleness to go around.

She didn't blame them for that. She wasn't gentle with herself either.

The Guns of Gamara had a creature called Moxilous. Huge and lumbering, pale and ugly.

Damaged.

It had been a more typical hoktril, a more destructive one. He said few words. He had a deadness in his eyes.

Even before she had seen the scar on the creature's head, she knew. And she could feel it when he was looking at her, that he saw the same thing that she did. He didn't understand a lot, but he understood that.

He spoke in single words, and he called her Little.

The alien with too many arms spoke in paragraphs, and he called her a test run. Experimental hoktril removal, and she was worth keeping so they could study the effects.

She knew that was a lie. The human had wanted her, and his friend had acquiesced. "Test run" was just a more viable excuse amid thin resources.

They kept Moxilous because he was strong.

They kept her because somebody wanted her.

It was nice of someone to want her when she was a worthless stump of what used to be a person.


	3. Dreamers

"How are you doing? Did you remember to eat today?"

It was the human. His name was Sven. Sven, the one who was always worried about her.

"A while ago."

"Here," he said.

She couldn't see well right now but she knew he was handing her something. It was already becoming habit to reach with her right hand.

Some kind of packaged nutritional unit. Not a very good one even if you WERE hungry.

She wished she could still feel that way.

"I really hate this," she said.

The human sat down with her.

"I know you do. I'm sorry."

"Yeah, well. It's not exactly your fault."

"That doesn't mean I can't want better for you."

"If you'd left me there, I wouldn't have cared."

She didn't mean that to sound quite so accusing.

"Well *I* would have cared."

"You're fighting a war. You can't AFFORD to care."

"Well I'm not going to be responsible for another-…"

"Another what?"

He sighed.

"Enough people have died."

People.

"Humans?"

He didn't say anything.

"What happened?" she egged.

"It's a long story."

"Yeah, well. I'm listening."

Dead air. She could hear him breathing.

"He was the sweetest boy. I loved him so much."

"So… what happened?"

"There was a ship… on Earth. We escaped the first round of enslavement. And we fought back but…"

She waited for him.

"I shouldn't have tried to remove it."

Her stomach got cold. She thought of the blood running down her neck.

"At least he's not living in hell now."

She realized a moment too late that was the wrong thing to say.

"I mean… it wasn't your fault," she added.

"I'm sorry I brought you to hell."

"Well. I'm sorry about your friend."

No amount of being sorry was going to fix either of those things.

"He would have made you laugh," Sven said. "It would have been a better hell."

"He sounds nice."

"He would have saved you, too."

No word on whether that was the nice thing to do.

"He sounds like a dreamer."

She thought she saw Sven smile.

"Well, weren't we all dreamers at one point?"

It had been the greatest honor of her brother's life to speak to the Alteans. She remembered the wonder and possibility in his eyes.

She'd even been jealous.

She missed being a dreamer like him.


	4. Love

A traditional hoktril was outfitted with spines. Little filaments that reached outward from the insertion needle, each following the contours of the brain to its intended bundle of neurons. It was a beautiful piece of technology; it was practically a living thing. Intricate, delicate, each thread reaching with something so like desire, like hunger, like love. Little branches that wove around the soft tissue, curving like a river. No two sat alike, a symbiote fitted to the imprint of the brain.

They had asked her how to remove it.

She began by designing a hoktril that could be removed.

They said that was not the question they were asking.

They showed her the blueprints.

They showed her the installation process.

They gave her one to hold in her hands.

She knew how to remove it.

She knew how to remove it until hers was gone. After that, there was no one left in the universe.

There had been her handler. He'd even moved to protect her before he was shot.

The Guns said protection of assets was the closest thing the Alteans had to love.

It was the only time he wasn't smiling.

But she was going to remember.

She could remember her father and her brother with those mindless eyes. How they couldn't hear her screaming.

She would remember that design, too. It was buried in fog and impossibility, but she would remember it.

Because she had something the Alteans could never imagine having.


	5. Guerilla

The Alteans wore pink to honor the fallen.

They had discovered a new kind of death.

On a slow path, the ship moved towards Altea.

They caught the distress beacon several star systems away. To a recess of space, they went after it.

Commander Hira's. No mayday call.

No answer when they hailed the ship.

Slowly it moved towards Altea.

They boarded.

Its order was disturbed and the non-cog was missing.

An insignia burned into the console.

The resistance.

One Altean, hoktrilled.

One Altean, dead.


	6. Organic

"What did you do to Treth?"

Katie gestured toward the alien – tall, lanky, sort of grayish-green. They said it was called an Olkari.

Treth had a hoktril.

But he did simple tasks on his own.

"Oh," Slav said. "He's an experiment." He shone a light into one of Treth's eyes. "I'm not sure how much longer he has…"

"Why, what did you DO?"

"Well you see, Katie," Slav said, trying to get Treth to track his finger, "I figured there was about a seventy-one and three-eighths percent chance that we could override the hoktril with a certain organic solution."

"Sure doesn't look THAT overridden," Katie noted, as Treth failed to follow Slav's hand.

Slav sighed.

"Well it wasn't a perfect solution. We've overridden SOME functions, but even then, there's about an eighty-eight percent chance he will die from this."

Katie got cold.

"What the fuck did you do to him?"

Slav queued up a hologram.

"Do you know what this is?"

She felt like she should have.

"Organic," she said.

"Yes. It is the egg of a certain parasitic worm. This worm only hatches when it detects viable gray matter in close proximity. Except for about 0.4 percent of the eggs, which have a genetic defect that causes them to hatch when somebody tells them a bedtime story, but those are less reproductively successful than their-"

"Does this have to do with anything?" Katie huffed.

"Yes," Slav changed the hologram. "When the larval worm starts feeding off the brain, it causes many cognitive and emotional disturbances. Because these disturbances override the host's normal behavior, I thought we might see if it would override the hoktril as well."

Treth began sucking on his fingers.

"And it does. Partially."

"But he's going to die," Katie said.

Slav sighed.

"When the larva metamorphoses."

"Why would you even TRY this? You knew that was going to happen and… well, LOOK at him!"

"Because of how the worm affects the brain," Slav said. "It does not simply cause a random disturbance. It latches on to a particular idea. You just have to feed it the right one."

"So…"

"So, Treth has been a great help to us. When we give him an idea, he runs with it, and about seventy-eight percent of the time, his creations are useful."

Treth had to be watched so he didn't tear down the walls of the base. She had seen it a couple of times, the magic he could do with metal. She didn't know those were things they'd ASKED him to build.

"He's a slave," she said involuntarily.

"I will not argue with you," Slav put his hands up. "I regret that this was our only option with Treth."

"What do you mean your ONLY option?"

"Do you want to know about the realities where we did NOT attempt this procedure?"

"Yes, actually."

"Well Treth has already died in about forty-two percent of them, I have died in thirty-six, Sven has died in ninety-two…"

"Okay, I get it," Katie grumbled.

"I know your little earthen head is worried," Slav patted her on the shoulder. "I'm not saying it was an easy decision. It all comes down to what the resistance can afford."

The resistance couldn't afford Treth.

She felt her fist balling up. It was time for her to leave.

"Where would any of us be without slaves?"


	7. Metamorphosis

Treth died a few days later. They anointed his forehead in pink.

The parasite they caught and contained. The exit wound was ugly.

"He did not die in vain," Slav said to her. It only sort of helped.

"Is this what he would have wanted?" she asked.

"The Olkari were given hoktrils because they resisted. Chances are good he would have wanted to fight somehow."

His eyes were glassy and open. She wasn't about to close them.

"He looks so young," she said.

Slav didn't appear to have any response to that.

Sven was nowhere to be found.

"So… what…?"

"Yes?" Slav said.

"What are you going to do with him now?"

She really wished Slav would be the one to close Treth's eyes.

"We have an incinerator."

She winced.

He reminded her of Matt, in a way.

"They wanted me to remove it," she said at last.

"Hmm?"

"The Alteans asked me how to remove the hoktril."

"Ohhh…" Slav said. He got a very strange expression that she thought looked a little bit amused.

"What?" she goaded.

"I suppose they got the present I sent them, is all," he said.

"Do I even want to know what that was?"

"No, you do not. And do not tell Sven."

Not like she could tell him something she didn't know.

"Slav…" she began.

"Yes, Katie?"

"I'm going to finish the hoktril removal design."

Slav looked at her without saying anything, and she just knew he was biting his tongue on how many realities she would actually succeed in.

"That would be useful," he said in the end.

"Yeah. I know."

She couldn't remember a single thing about it.

The body stared at her with eyes so much like Matt's.

"Slav, I'm going to need Treth."


	8. Necropsy

The Olkari brain was different from a human one. Some of the differences were easily attributed to the worm infection. Some, less so.

But more or less, every hoktril was created equal.

This one was dead now. Without a living host, it had stopped glowing.

She silently begged Treth's forgiveness and split the lobes of his brain.

They didn't come apart so easily. Little wires of hoktril formed a web that held both sides together. The sounds were slick, the cuts weren't clean.

Her heart started pounding even harder.

She didn't know how to do this anymore. What the fuck was she doing, mutilating somebody's body, and for what? She didn't know anything at all. What if none of this helped ANYTHING? And with her dominant hand so unwieldly…. making a mess without learning anything wasn't science, it was defilement.

It might have been different if she liked ANYTHING about what she was seeing. But it was even worse than she'd imagined it. The hoktril was so enmeshed in the brain, not even the most careful surgery could have taken it out safely.

This thing deserved to die a thousand times over.

What about Matt. What about her dad.

She didn't know where her mom was. Katie had been taken shortly after her dad and her brother went to greet the extraterrestrials. It was then that the Alteans had asked for her. Her mom had let her go.

Where was Treth's mom?

She took off the gloves and wiped her eyes.

"I'm sorry," she said.

The smell was starting to get to her.

Little wires glinted in the light.

She tried to remember what the Alteans had showed her.

What was it that her handler had said?

 _Like living things…_

Something about living things.

In a nonliving brain, the hoktril lay dormant. It was like the worm. It was a parasite.

She wondered if those streaks in the tissue were worm shit.

There must have been millions more connections in the Olkari brain than a human one. She could see it in the folds, it was the most complicated thing she had ever taken apart.

She was no biologist.

But maybe the hoktril didn't send out as many tendrils in a simpler brain. Maybe it would be easier to remove in a human.

Were there still pieces of this left in Moxilous?

He was angry right now. Every now and then she could hear a crash from the other room.

She made a note of it never to get Moxilous mad.

 _Living things…_

"What ABOUT living things?" she said aloud.

Living things.

Was Treth's mother alive somewhere? He hardly looked more than a child. Maybe they could have been friends.

These were some incredibly unscientific thoughts.

"You gotta help me out here," she said to Treth.

She didn't know why she said that.

"I need to know what it is about living things that's so important to the hoktril. The Alteans told me everything about it, but I don't remember anything except THAT. And I need to know or else… nothing's ever gonna go right again."

She began to put the gloves back on.

"I wish I could do the kind of things you used to do."

She picked up another tool.

"I wish I knew you when you were still you."

She prodded an artery to drain it a little more.

"On my planet we bury our dead."

It was taking a long time to reach the main part of the hoktril.

There came a point when Treth was no longer recognizably Treth. She had closed his eyes before that. Beside her was a pile of excess tissue.

The first of the two needles was the smaller one. She thought about pulling it out.

No. She was going to see how the hoktril sat when it was intact. She could take it apart later if she wanted to.

She could take apart her own.

The second needle surfaced a while later, deep within the midbrain. By now she had scraped so much brain tissue from the scaffold, it looked like a brittle red coral.

 _The two needles…_ she could almost remember what her handler said.

Something…

She didn't know what, but something possessed her to take off her glove, reach in, and touch them.

She didn't want to. She HAD to.

The first needle was wet.

She reached further in to touch the second as well.

The hoktril began to glow.

"Fucking shit…"

It stopped when she pulled out her hand.

She wanted to wash it immediately.

What was that.

"Why did I do that?" she said to Treth.

To complete the circuit.

The circuit.

The circuit that was normally closed with living brain tissue.

Because it had something in it. Something that powered the hoktril.

Something that was in her hand, too. Something that was found in all living things.

It had a name, and she knew what it was.

"Quintessence."


End file.
